What Desires Are Politically Important?

Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have chosen this subject for my lecture
tonight because I think that most current discussions of politics
and political theory take insufficient account of psychology.
Economic facts, population statistics, constitutional
organization, and so on, are set forth minutely. There is no
difficulty in finding out how many South Koreans and how many
North Koreans there were when the Korean War began. If you will
look into the right books you will be able to ascertain what was
their average income per head, and what were the sizes of their
respective armies. But if you want to know what sort of person a
Korean is, and whether there is any appreciable difference
between a North Korean and a South Korean; if you wish to know
what they respectively want out of life, what are their
discontents, what their hopes and what their fears; in a word,
what it is that, as they say, «makes them tick», you
will look through the reference books in vain. And so you cannot
tell whether the South Koreans are enthusiastic about UNO, or would prefer
union with their cousins in the North. Nor can you guess whether
they are willing to forgo land reform for the privilege of voting
for some politician they have never heard of. It is neglect of
such questions by the eminent men who sit in remote capitals,
that so frequently causes disappointment. If politics is to
become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly
surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should
penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action. What is
the influence of hunger upon slogans? How does their
effectiveness fluctuate with the number of calories in your diet?
If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of
grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to
the vote? Such questions are far too little considered. However,
let us, for the present, forget the Koreans, and consider the
human race.

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly
fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the
effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of
duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because
no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no
hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know
what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their
material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their
desires with their relative strengths.

There are some desires which, though very powerful, have not, as
a rule, any great political importance. Most men at some period
of their lives desire to marry, but as a rule they can satisfy
this desire without having to take any political action. There
are, of course, exceptions; the rape of the Sabine women is a
case in point. And the development of northern Australia is
seriously impeded by the fact that the vigorous young men who
ought to do the work dislike being wholly deprived of female
society. But such cases are unusual, and in general the interest
that men and women take in each other has little influence upon
politics.

The desires that are politically important may be divided into a
primary and a secondary group. In the primary group come the
necessities of life: food and shelter and clothing. When these
things become very scarce, there is no limit to the efforts that
men will make, or to the violence that they will display, in the
hope of securing them. It is said by students of the earliest
history that, on four separate occasions, drought in Arabia
caused the population of that country to overflow into
surrounding regions, with immense effects, political, cultural,
and religious. The last of these four occasions was the rise of
Islam. The gradual spread of Germanic tribes from southern Russia
to England, and thence to San Francisco, had similar motives.
Undoubtedly the desire for food has been, and still is, one of
the main causes of great political events.

But man differs from other animals in one very important respect,
and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak,
infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would
keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he
has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until
he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not
like this. When the Arabs, who had been used to living sparingly
on a few dates, acquired the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire,
and dwelt in palaces of almost unbelievable luxury, they did not,
on that account, become inactive. Hunger could no longer be a
motive, for Greek slaves supplied them with exquisite viands at
the slightest nod. But other desires kept them active: four in
particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity,
and love of power.

Acquisitiveness - the wish to possess as much as possible of
goods, or the title to goods - is a motive which, I suppose, has
its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for
necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who
had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They
lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they
spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing
potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had
experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar
manner. Similarly the Arab chieftains on their silken Byzantine
divans could not forget the desert, and hoarded riches far beyond
any possible physical need. But whatever may be the
psychoanalysis of acquisitiveness, no one can deny that it is one
of the great motives - especially among the more powerful, for,
as I said before, it is one of the infinite motives. However much
you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is
a dream which will always elude you.

But acquisitiveness, although it is the mainspring of the
capitalist system, is by no means the most powerful of the
motives that survive the conquest of hunger. Rivalry is a much
stronger motive. Over and over again in Mohammedan history,
dynasties have come to grief because the sons of a sultan by
different mothers could not agree, and in the resulting civil war
universal ruin resulted. The same sort of thing happens in modern
Europe. When the British Government very unwisely allowed the
Kaiser to be present at a naval review at Spithead, the thought
which arose in his mind was not the one which we had intended.
What he thought was, «I must have a Navy as good as
Grandmamma's». And from this thought have sprung all our
subsequent troubles. The world would be a happier place than it
is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in
fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if
they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the
present level of taxation.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do
with children knows how they are constantly performing some
antic, and saying «Look at me». «Look at me»
is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can
take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of
posthumous fame. There was a Renaissance Italian princeling who
was asked by the priest on his deathbed if he had anything to
repent of. «Yes», he said, «there is one thing. On
one occasion I had a visit from the Emperor and the Pope
simultaneously. I took them to the top of my tower to see the
view, and I neglected the opportunity to throw them both down,
which would have given me immortal fame». History does not
relate whether the priest gave him absolution. One of the
troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The
more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked
about. The condemned murderer who is allowed to see the account
of his trial in the press is indignant if he finds a newspaper
which has reported it inadequately. And the more he finds about
himself in other newspapers, the more indignant he will be with
the one whose reports are meagre. Politicians and literary men
are in the same case. And the more famous they become, the more
difficult the press-cutting agency finds it to satisfy them. It
is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity
throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to
the potentate at whose frown the world trembles. Mankind have
even committed the impiety of attributing similar desires to the
Deity, whom they imagine avid for continual praise.

But great as is the influence of the motives we have been
considering, there is one which outweighs them all. I mean the
love of power. Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is
not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its
satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without
power. The people who enjoy the greatest glory in the United
States are film stars, but they can be put in their place by the
Committee for Un-American Activities, which enjoys no glory
whatever. In England, the King has more glory than the Prime
Minister, but the Prime Minister has more power than the King.
Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people
have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer
power to glory. When Blücher, in 1814, saw Napoleon's
palaces, he said, «Wasn't he a fool to have all this and to
go running after Moscow.» Napoleon, who certainly was not
destitute of vanity, preferred power when he had to choose. To
Blücher, this choice seemed foolish. Power, like vanity, is
insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it
completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men,
the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to
its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the
lives of important men.

Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power,
and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.
In the happy days before 1914, when well-to-do ladies could
acquire a host of servants, their pleasure in exercising power
over the domestics steadily increased with age. Similarly, in any
autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly
tyrannical with experience of the delights that power can afford.
Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what
they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of
power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure. If you
ask your boss for leave of absence from the office on some
legitimate occasion, his love of power will derive more
satisfaction from a refusal than from a consent. If you require a
building permit, the petty official concerned will obviously get
more pleasure from saying «No» than from saying
«Yes». It is this sort of thing which makes the love of
power such a dangerous motive.

But it has other sides which are more desirable. The pursuit of
knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so
are all advances in scientific technique. In politics, also, a
reformer may have just as strong a love of power as a despot. It
would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as
a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which
are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the
social system, and upon your capacities. If your capacities are
theoretical or technical, you will contribute to knowledge or
technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you
are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a
rule this motive will join itself on to the desire to see some
state of affairs realized which, for some reason, you prefer to
the status quo. A great general may, like Alcibiades, be quite
indifferent as to which side he fights on, but most generals have
preferred to fight for their own country, and have, therefore,
had other motives besides love of power. The politician may
change sides so frequently as to find himself always in the
majority, but most politicians have a preference for one party to
the other, and subordinate their love of power to this
preference. Love of power as nearly pure as possible is to be
seen in various different types of men. One type is the soldier
of fortune, of whom Napoleon is the supreme example. Napoleon
had, I think, no ideological preference for France over Corsica,
but if he had become Emperor of Corsica he would not have been so
great a man as he became by pretending to be a Frenchman. Such
men, however, are not quite pure examples, since they also derive
immense satisfaction from vanity. The purest type is that of the
eminence grise - the power behind the throne that never
appears in public, and merely hugs itself with the secret
thought: «How little these puppets know who is pulling the
strings.» Baron Holstein, who controlled the foreign policy
of the German Empire from 1890 to 1906, illustrates this type to
perfection. He lived in a slum; he never appeared in society; he
avoided meeting the Emperor, except on one single occasion when
the Emperor's importunity could not be resisted; he refused all
invitations to Court functions, on the ground that he possessed
no court dress. He had acquired secrets which enabled him to
blackmail the Chancellor and many of the Kaiser's intimates. He
used the power of blackmail, not to acquire wealth, or fame, or
any other obvious advantage, but merely to compel the adoption of
the foreign policy he preferred. In the East, similar characters
were not very uncommon among eunuchs.

I come now to other motives which, though in a sense less
fundamental than those we have been considering, are still of
considerable importance. The first of these is love of
excitement. Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by
their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in
examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the
rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be,
experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really
powerful desires of almost all human beings. When white men first
effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer
them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to
pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most
savages receive with indifference. What they really value among
the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which
enables them, for the first time in their lives, to have the
illusion for a few brief moments that it is better to be alive
than dead. Red Indians, while they were still unaffected by white
men, would smoke their pipes, not calmly as we do, but
orgiastically, inhaling so deeply that they sank into a faint.
And when excitement by means of nicotine failed, a patriotic
orator would stir them up to attack a neighbouring tribe, which
would give them all the enjoyment that we (according to our
temperament) derive from a horse race or a General Election. The
pleasure of gambling consists almost entirely in excitement.
Monsieur Huc describes Chinese traders at the Great Wall in
winter, gambling until they have lost all their cash, then
proceeding to lose all their merchandise, and at last gambling
away their clothes and going out naked to die of cold. With
civilized men, as with primitive Red Indian tribes, it is, I
think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace
applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly the same as
at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat
more serious.

It is not altogether easy to decide what is the root cause of the
love of excitement. I incline to think that our mental make-up is
adapted to the stage when men lived by hunting. When a man spent
a long day with very primitive weapons in stalking a deer with
the hope of dinner, and when, at the end of the day, he dragged
the carcass triumphantly to his cave, he sank down in contented
weariness, while his wife dressed and cooked the meat. He was
sleepy, and his bones ached, and the smell of cooking filled
every nook and cranny of his consciousness. At last, after
eating, he sank into deep sleep. In such a life there was neither
time nor energy for boredom. But when he took to agriculture, and
made his wife do all the heavy work in the fields, he had time to
reflect upon the vanity of human life, to invent mythologies and
systems of philosophy, and to dream of the life hereafter in
which he would perpetually hunt the wild boar of Valhalla. Our
mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor.
I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would
cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no
need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of
sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on
these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is
sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized
muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the
echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them
killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five
miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however,
impracticable, and if the human race is to survive - a thing
which is, perhaps, undesirable - other means must be found for
securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that
produces love of excitement. This is a matter which has been too
little considered, both by moralists and by social reformers. The
social reformers are of the opinion that they have more serious
things to consider. The moralists, on the other hand, are
immensely impressed with the seriousness of all the permitted
outlets of the love of excitement; the seriousness, however, in
their minds, is that of Sin. Dance halls, cinemas, this age of
jazz, are all, if we may believe our ears, gateways to Hell, and
we should be better employed sitting at home contemplating our
sins. I find myself unable to be in entire agreement with the
grave men who utter these warnings. The devil has many forms,
some designed to deceive the young, some designed to deceive the
old and serious. If it is the devil that tempts the young to
enjoy themselves, is it not, perhaps, the same personage that
persuades the old to condemn their enjoyment? And is not
condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to
old age? And is it not, perhaps, a drug which - like opium - has
to be taken in continually stronger doses to produce the desired
effect? Is it not to be feared that, beginning with the
wickedness of the cinema, we should be led step by step to
condemn the opposite political party, dagoes, wops, Asiatics,
and, in short, everybody except the fellow members of our club?
And it is from just such condemnations, when widespread, that
wars proceed. I have never heard of a war that proceeded from
dance halls.

What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are
destructive. It is destructive in those who cannot resist excess
in alcohol or gambling. It is destructive when it takes the form
of mob violence. And above all it is destructive when it leads to
war. It is so deep a need that it will find harmful outlets of
this kind unless innocent outlets are at hand. There are such
innocent outlets at present in sport, and in politics so long as
it is kept within constitutional bounds. But these are not
sufficient, especially as the kind of politics that is most
exciting is also the kind that does most harm. Civilized life has
grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must
provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote
ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia, where people are
few and rabbits are many, I watched a whole populace satisfying
the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the skillful
slaughter of many thousands of rabbits. But in London or New York
some other means must be found to gratify primitive impulse. I
think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that
people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should
contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found
advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a
day with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should
be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love of
excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment
of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are
capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes
thought.

Interwoven with many other political motives are two closely
related passions to which human beings are regrettably prone: I
mean fear and hate. It is normal to hate what we fear, and it
happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate.
I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that
they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their
own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all
are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other
herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of
them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a
whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is
this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive
reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person
will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of
another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied
international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is
to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with
other herds. If you are English and someone says to you,
«The French are your brothers», your first instinctive
feeling will be, «Nonsense. They shrug their shoulders, and
talk French. And I am even told that they eat frogs.» If he
explains to you that we may have to fight the Russians, that, if
so, it will be desirable to defend the line of the Rhine, and
that, if the line of the Rhine is to be defended, the help of the
French is essential, you will begin to see what he means when he
says that the French are your brothers. But if some
fellow-traveller were to go on to say that the Russians also are
your brothers, he would be unable to persuade you, unless he
could show that we are in danger from the Martians. We love those
who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be
very few people whom we should love.

All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned
solely with attitudes towards other human beings. You might
regard the soil as your enemy because it yields reluctantly a
niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature in general
as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the
better of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way,
cooperation of the whole human race would become easy. And men
could easily be brought to view life in this way if schools,
newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end. But
schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir
up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of
the three, therefore, can do anything towards saving the human
race from reciprocal suicide.

There are two ways of coping with fear: one is to diminish the
external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance.
The latter can be reinforced, except where immediate action is
necessary, by turning our thoughts away from the cause of fear.
The conquest of fear is of very great importance. Fear is in
itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces
hate of that which is feared, and it leads headlong to excesses
of cruelty. Nothing has so beneficent an effect on human beings
as security. If an international system could be established
which would remove the fear of war, the improvement in everyday
mentality of everyday people would be enormous and very rapid.
Fear, at present, overshadows the world. The atom bomb and the
bacterial bomb, wielded by the wicked communist or the wicked
capitalist as the case may be, make Washington and the Kremlin
tremble, and drive men further along the road toward the abyss.
If matters are to improve, the first and essential step is to
find a way of diminishing fear. The world at present is obsessed
by the conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent
causes of conflict is the desire for the victory of our own
ideology and the defeat of the other. I do not think that the
fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think
the ideologies are merely a way of grouping people, and that the
passions involved are merely those which always arise between
rival groups. There are, of course, various reasons for hating
communists. First and foremost, we believe that they wish to take
away our property. But so do burglars, and although we disapprove
of burglars our attitude towards them is very different indeed
from our attitude towards communists - chiefly because they do
not inspire the same degree of fear. Secondly, we hate the
communists because they are irreligious. But the Chinese have
been irreligious since the eleventh century, and we only began to
hate them when they turned out Chiang Kai-shek. Thirdly, we hate
the communists because they do not believe in democracy, but we
consider this no reason for hating Franco. Fourthly, we hate them
because they do not allow liberty; this we feel so strongly that
we have decided to imitate them. It is obvious that none of these
is the real ground for our hatred. We hate them because we fear
them and they threaten us. If the Russians still adhered to the
Greek Orthodox religion, if they had instituted parliamentary
government, and if they had a completely free press which daily
vituperated us, then - provided they still had armed forces as
powerful as they have now - we should still hate them if they
gave us ground for thinking them hostile. There is, of course,
the odium theologicum, and it can be a cause of enmity.
But I think that this is an offshoot of herd feeling: the man who
has a different theology feels strange, and whatever is strange
must be dangerous. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by
which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same
however the herd may have been generated.

You may have been feeling that I have allowed only for bad
motives, or, at best, such as are ethically neutral. I am afraid
they are, as a rule, more powerful than more altruistic motives,
but I do not deny that altruistic motives exist, and may, on
occasion, be effective. The agitation against slavery in England
in the early nineteenth century was indubitably altruistic, and
was thoroughly effective. Its altruism was proved by the fact
that in 1833 British taxpayers paid many millions in compensation
to Jamaican landowners for the liberation of their slaves, and
also by the fact that at the Congress of Vienna the British
Government was prepared to make important concessions with a view
to inducing other nations to abandon the slave trade. This is an
instance from the past, but present-day America has afforded
instances equally remarkable. I will not, however, go into these,
as I do not wish to become embarked in current
controversies.

I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine
motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat
uncomfortable by the sufferings of some other people. It is
sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the
last hundred years. We are shocked when we hear stories of the
ill-treatment of lunatics, and there are now quite a number of
asylums in which they are not ill-treated. Prisoners in Western
countries are not supposed to be tortured, and when they are,
there is an outcry if the facts are discovered. We do not approve
of treating orphans as they are treated in Oliver Twist.
Protestant countries disapprove of cruelty to animals. In all
these ways sympathy has been politically effective. If the fear
of war were removed, its effectiveness would become much greater.
Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will
be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

The time has come to sum up our discussion. Politics is concerned
with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which
are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the
various members of a given herd can feel alike. The broad
instinctive mechanism upon which political edifices have to be
built is one of cooperation within the herd and hostility towards
other herds. The co-operation within the herd is never perfect.
There are members who do not conform, who are, in the
etymological sense, «egregious», that is to say,
outside the flock. These members are those who have fallen below,
or risen above, the ordinary level. They are: idiots, criminals,
prophets, and discoverers. A wise herd will learn to tolerate the
eccentricity of those who rise above the average, and to treat
with a minimum of ferocity those who fall below it.

As regards relations to other herds, modern technique has
produced a conflict between self-interest and instinct. In old
days, when two tribes went to war, one of them exterminated the
other, and annexed its territory. From the point of view of the
victor, the whole operation was thoroughly satisfactory. The
killing was not at all expensive, and the excitement was
agreeable. It is not to be wondered at that, in such
circumstances, war persisted. Unfortunately, we still have the
emotions appropriate to such primitive warfare, while the actual
operations of war have changed completely. Killing an enemy in a
modern war is a very expensive operation. If you consider how
many Germans were killed in the late war, and how much the
victors are paying in income tax, you can, by a sum in long
division, discover the cost of a dead German, and you will find
it considerable. In the East, it is true, the enemies of the
Germans have secured the ancient advantages of turning out the
defeated population and occupying their lands. The Western
victors, however, have secured no such advantages. It is obvious
that modern war is not good business from a financial point of
view. Although we won both the world wars, we should now be much
richer if they had not occured. If men were actuated by
self-interest, which they are not - except in the case of a few
saints - the whole human race would cooperate. There would be no
more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs.
There would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning
the minds of Nation A against Nation B, and reciprocally of
Nation B against Nation A. There would not be armies of officials
at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books and foreign
ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be
customs barriers to ensure the existence of many small
enterprises where one big enterprise would be more economic. All
this would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness
as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But,
you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams ?
Moralists will see to it that we do not become wholly selfish,
and until we do the millennium will be impossible.

I do not wish to seem to end upon a note of cynicism. I do not
deny that there are better things than selfishness, and that some
people achieve these things. I maintain, however, on the one
hand, that there are few occasions upon which large bodies of
men, such as politics is concerned with, can rise above
selfishness, while, on the other hand, there are a very great
many circumstances in which populations will fall below
selfishness, if selfishness is interpreted as enlightened
self-interest.

And among those occasions on which people fall below
self-interest are most of the occasions on which they are
convinced that they are acting from idealistic motives. Much that
passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of
power. When you see large masses of men swayed by what appear to
be noble motives, it is as well to look below the surface and ask
yourself what it is that makes these motives effective. It is
partly because it is so easy to be taken in by a facade of
nobility that a psychological inquiry, such as I have been
attempting, is worth making. I would say, in conclusion, that if
what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the
world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an
optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can
be fostered by known methods of education.